Arrival to Earth: How the Thing Met the Collector
by Brandon Hinchman
Summary: A scourge to countless worlds, the Thing, in slumber on a rogue planet, has been captured by a space traveler seeking to collect rare species in the galaxy. Confined to a prison on an intergalactic spaceship, the Thing waits for the right moment to strike its powerful captor, leading to a hopeless situation that forces it to experience a new emotion: fear.


How the Thing Met the Collector

By Brandon Hinchman

 _© 2018 Brandon Hinchman_

1\. The Acquisition

For most, it was death. For some, it was life. For all, it was terror. An abomination amid a myriad of creatures, the Thing hunted for reasons unclear to most. Consumption was part of its process, but its purpose? Only those that lasted to the end in its building wake of possession realized the horror of annihilation—not merely of the self and species but of life as it was known.

There it floated, sprawled in a supine display of exoskeletal awe, adrift in bleak water on the rogue planet. The Thing was barely submerged in the dark ocean, and its long tentacles that exhibited dim bioluminescence in the dreary depths lured what little ocean life that swam by the surface, which it consumed for enjoyment. Legs curled inward to play dead, and in combination with a lack of movement and no circulation, nothing indicated that the Thing should be feared by anything living, a mistake made by what was nearly all the species of life on that planet.

It was dead so far as the Collector could infer, for the planet provided a scene so hot and dark seemingly no life would be able to thrive there. The Thing could detect the ship's bright outline through the translucent murkiness, so it continued to drift with the occasional circulation of the black, acerbic water, staying motionless. Its large crustacean form held a dense shell capable of surviving intense heat through a gradual, invisible, non-stop molting process, which had been acquired from a distant alien world in times ancient—a process so slow that it was undetected by the Collector's gadgets and senses.

Being the last of that arthropodan species on the planet, the carcass had stuck out to the Collector like a beacon. Stealthily working its way towards the surface, the Carcass-Thing floated like a giant silhouette in a sea of darkness whose only light was glimmers of rift valleys and microbes adept enough to stay alive but too weak to propagate enough to grow beyond the dusky realm.

In the sky, a single sheet of white stars surrounded a comet screaming low at the deaf ears of a black abyss. No sound. No hope. No despair. Perfection, the Thing thought. All scenery stayed static on this motionless sphere, where night wasn't even a concept since day had never been known. And the Collector's ship, a red scepter amid spinning, blinding purple rays created desolate perspective. Controlled and purposeful, the Collector whirled the ship's trajectory to bring it right in line with the Arthropod-Thing, accounting for its immense mass settling on rocky, barren terrain. The Arthropod-Thing stayed unmoving. It fought its body's genetic memory that urged it to scurry under a rock deep in the ocean while its higher cognitive functions relished the irony of being pursued instead of being the pursuer. The Arthropod-Thing had too much experience to give in to its lower, primitive instincts. It _wanted_ to be found.

If the generations of incarnations the Thing had possessively claimed witness to over thousands of years carried a single theme, it was that all living beings, no matter their form, fear death; and, in moving alongside the mortally wounded, pretense of death's nonexistence was essential to living. Oh, how the countless species had walked carelessly by those carcasses. Deceit was the Thing's strategy, and the narcissistic dismissal of death that all prey clung to acted as the Thing's ally.

The Collector exited the loud craft, having no need for a suit. The ship was obtuse in the unwelcoming setting. The planet was, after all, a single step from being a void. How the Thing had arrived was curious. How the Collector had found the Thing was perplexing. It had obviously possessed the technology to scan the planet for atmosphere, and it clearly had the body to survive the sweltering, sulfuric air, at least temporarily. It walked sure-footed on the bank, striding in bleakness towards the floating, stagnant carcass, confidently scooped it up in claws that slowly closed around the Arthropod-Thing's meatiest limb, quietly picked it up in one motion and strode towards the ship's opening.

The Collector had once been in this region of the galaxy, though it had never encountered this planet. The discovery was heavier than it had expected. While being carried aboard the ship, the Arthropod-Thing silently considered the immense strength the Collector needed to effortlessly carry this bulky, clumsy incarnation. It once again buried the persistent instinctual memory of the crustacean species it had overtaken…a memory of fright and consequential exhibition of autonomic responses, which would have mimicked eager excitement. It savored in consideration of how many generations the species must have undergone to have such a visceral response to the alien captor, one that thousands had experienced upon being consumed by the Thing.

The temperature change from the planet to the ship's atmosphere stiffened the Arthropod-Thing's exoskeleton. It resisted its own genetic memory to shapeshift in order to account for the difference in degree. Death was on its mind in more ways than one.

A clear cage acting as a cell had already been prepared for the body. The Collector gently settled the huge carcass on a lit apparatus, not out of respect but desire for preservation. The sidewall closed, sealing off the cell with a pattern touch on a keypad. In its simulated death, the Arthropod-Thing heard fragments of scratching with its detached hearing. All around the ship, there was mostly silence except for pockets of these sounds. And the silence became a loud series of booms gradually increasing in tempo as the ship's engine booted up. The Arthropod-Thing was jarred completely from its slumber at this sound, yet counting on its experience and memories from millennia of deception, it made no movement. In human terms, it was as though it had awakened while making a seamless and conscious effort to keep its eyelids shut. There was no outward sign that it was alive.

The Arthropod-Thing could sense the Collector's gaze admiring its new discovery. It could feel the Collector's unassuming glee in gathering a form of life that would have otherwise been missed on that lonely planet drifting on the outer reaches of a dying star's dim gravity. It wasn't the type of discovery that excited the Collector but its rarity.

Even in its deep rest, the Arthropod-Thing had allowed a small particle of organic matter to seep into the bloodstream of the Collector instantly after it was first grasped by the large pincer. There was a faint, though undeniable, glimmer of psychic connection, enough for the Arthropod-Thing to feel the Collector's emotional response to its newly found treasure, which was an odd mixture of excitement and relief.

In all its incarnations, the Thing had always understood fear. It had commanded horror in innumerable types of lifeforms. Every one of the Thing's victims had felt extreme fright at confronting the uncomfortable truth of being eaten while alive and conscious with annihilation looming. And then there was the relief felt at the glimpse of contour between old body and new, realizing that life wasn't gone but changed—albeit disturbingly. And that relief always changed to sadness just before any trace of personality from the old body extinguished into a nothingness bleaker than that same planet from which the ship had recently departed. In regard to fear, the Thing was certain that the Collector had none at that moment, though the Thing knew that would soon change. The cells from their brief touch had been working to scan and mimic the Collector's biology, which allowed the Arthropod-Thing to feel a psychic glimmer of what the Collector felt. At that time, it was clear that the Collector was excited and would soon be by for astute examination of its new find.

Of course, the Thing knew that it _could_ , and most likely _would_ , catch the Collector off guard, but the two were similar in a way; perhaps too similar to use a standard approach of apprehension. Both entities clearly carried a vast knowledge of different types of species, and the Arthropod-Thing pondered the possibility of the Collector accurately predicting that, all along, its discovery was indeed still living. It would be a gamble, but even if it had to stay confined for a long time, it would be easy to survive in such an atmosphere. It would continue to pretend to be a static arthropodan lifeform, providing no real threat other than the brute force that the reinforced clear walls of the cell would easily hold back. Even if such a possible scenario occurred, the Collector, like all species the Thing had encountered, would gradually let its guard down, assuming the environment to be harmless. That is how the Thing preferred to strike: when expectation and resistance were at their lowest.

More pronounced was their trait of possession, though this differed greatly in motivation. While the Collector possessed living beings in cages, the Thing possessed _being_ itself—the essence of ideas, memories, desires, fears and hopes. The Collector took pride in that which is rare; the Thing took pride in that which is profane. The Collector separated entities from their habitats; the Thing extracted souls from their bodies. The Collector's mission was to understand and control; the Thing's mission was to annihilate and become. The two looked nearly inseparable amongst the bleak void peppered with twinkling lights yet starkly distinct inside the damp ship.

2\. The Struggle

After the first assimilation, all is understood about a species. Each individual form of any type of life is a product of a series of hereditary adaptations that is a result of a whole network of ancestors propagating and leading up to that one representation of self. And in the assimilation process, all aspects of the lifeform are integrated immediately. One lifeform's memories and intelligence becomes the memories and intelligence of generations immemorial. It is in this ancient understanding that the Thing, no matter its form, can manipulate even the wisest of inhabitants on any planet.

The Arthropod-Thing watched as the Collector seemed to set a course for a different planet, one that was 70 solar systems away. It knew this from having assimilated a horde of species of the same type of intelligence and history as the Collector. Although the species were not physiologically similar, the intelligence level and ability to engineer spaceships were comparable. The technology of the planet had been difficult to diffuse and circumvent, and the species was clever—more intelligent than the Thing until the first successful assimilation. The Arthropod-Thing accounted for the possibility that the Collector had stolen the technology, so in more extreme effort, it concentrated, allowing itself to draw on deeper memories from that distant time when it had encountered the similar species.

After achieving orbit from the light-forsaken planet, the ship's engines hummed as they spun with what seemed like renewed purpose. Without sound, a small compound eye sprouted from the Arthropod-Thing's chest. It watched the Collector connect its vertebrae to valves that hooked in to the ship's console, and it autonomically responded with the equivalent of a smile in the form of circulating blood. Once the coordinates seemed to be set, the Collector detached itself from the ship's console and walked toward the cage of its new acquisition.

Before being detected, the Arthropod-Thing swiftly withdrew its eye back into its chest cavity, though not fully. The rest of the body stayed meditating and silent. The Collector clicked as it seemed to caress the cell. It was waiting to see any movement in spite of the sensors on the ship indicating that no significant movement had taken place beyond the usual motion from turbulence by starting the spaceship's engines. The Arthropod-Thing's compound eye detected the movement and stayed completely stationary, peripherally studying the Collector.

The Collector was head level with the Arthropod-Thing, its body still atop the lit apparatus. It dialed a series of three digits in the keypad and an abrupt fog of ice steamed up the protective cover, making vision impossible for a moment. No movement. The Collector, more confident this time, accessed the keypad again, opening the top hatch of the cell. It apparently intended to get a tissue sample, or at least take a closer look, the Arthropod-Thing concluded right before it attacked the Collector.

A series of stringy tentacles jutted out at the Collector's wiry arms, ceasing them and immediately creating a stretched bridge of chemical bonds between bodies. The Collector jumped back, startled, and it used its immense strength to resist the grip, breaking some of the woody, red vines clinging to its pincers.

The barbs on the tentacles refused to let go, even those on the few feelers that had been stretched and cracked. What had been snapped off was replaced with more tentacles on the Arthropod-Thing, and the ones that had clung to the Collector's pincers from the start had buried deep into its crustaceous grooves. In a move out of desperation to kill the discovery, the Collector slammed a large pincer down on the torso of the Arthropod-Thing. It split into two, effortlessly ejecting outward at both ends of the room's clearing. The Collector's eye stalks frantically looked around the surface of the ship.

The Arthropod-Thing responded with satisfaction in familiarity. Watching and feeling the Collector's strategy dissipating and being consumed by panic temporarily quenched his ancient, endless thirst for immersion. That same antiquated awareness of countless other worlds surfaced in the Arthropod-Thing, bypassing the current shell's genetic purpose and allowing a vast genomic database to burst to life, fully vibrant and acclimated. It wanted to become everything it had ever been, all at once. It felt as though it had hidden its immense, beautiful adaptability for far too long.

The more the Collector struggled to free itself from the confines of the Thing, which now incarnated a disfigured body comprising three different large insects, the closer it came to accepting its own inevitable death. Consumption…after all these years…. And more, the fear of annihilation, which loomed in the souls of all living things, made the process as much of a meal as it was assimilation and survival. In spite of centuries traveling to distant stars and strange planets, to the Collector, dying would be the same as never having existed at all. This insight was not unique to the Collector, the Thing knew; for in its experience, all creatures felt this fear-motivated epiphany at the genuine prospect of death.

The Collector exclaimed a loud, rhythmic screech, one that the Thing, based on experience with other alien life, figured was paradoxically composed of disbelief and acceptance at a grim realization—the beginning of the transformation that emerged immediately prior to death. The Thing had never been consumed to annihilation, but it nevertheless felt a distant form of compassion and sought to usher a psychic form of reassurance for its victims that legacy would, indeed, take hold.

The death of an individual animal—or even a species as a whole—was only temporary, for the formations of the thousands of incarnations it would behold on future unsuspecting worlds would justify the deaths of the relatively few that cried out in fear of being erased. And in the end, the Thing continued to consume as it pondered the paradox of fearing the possession that followed looming annihilation. Beings did not want to be controlled. The Thing, in all its manifestations, knew this. Yet it had never pondered how it must feel since the Thing never faced possession as a threat. It relished being consumed by many forms of life since they all had acted as temporary hosts to what became a chemical abomination resulting in its consciousness rising to the top.

Two Insect-Thing incarnations latched on to the Collector's sinewy feet while the third burrowed deep into a crevice on its head. The more the Collector struggled to undo the Insect-Thing's bond, the more it pulled at its own body, for the two were now bonded inseparable. The traveler of worlds that gathered and contained strange life had become a thrashing contradiction simultaneously in its last moments of life and on the brink of eternity. The precipice of obliteration hung suspended on one final penetration of an Insect-Thing, and the Collector knew it had finished living while being enveloped by the very darkness it once commanded in navigation. Bearing witness to it all, the Cosmos wept.

3\. The New World

It took a long time for the Insect-Things to combine into one being and then fully consume and duplicate the Collector. The Collector-Thing stood tall on its strong, hinged legs, fresh, bony skin tingling in the dim ship's light. A new world of memories inserted itself into its consciousness. Understanding of the ship's engineering, the previous captain's goals and astounding emotional connections the Collector had experienced with countless other lifeforms inundated the emotions of the Collector-Thing. At once, it was understood that the Collector once knew companions, but they were all killed in an unexpected geological adventure, of sorts.

The Collector's species had taken pride in acclimating to different atmospheres. Like adolescents seeing who could hold their breath underwater the longest before coming up and gasping for air, the Collector's species sought to visit as many harsh atmospheres as possible and, along the way, often delighted in finding life that had propagated in extreme temperatures and harsh terrains.

Drawing even further in memory, the Collector-Thing realized that the Collector hadn't started off imprisoning aliens but admiring them from a distance. It was originally a diplomat of sorts, and its fascination with other lifeforms changed over the years into a compulsion to collect them as relics, like memory trophies for the sole sake of remembering its species, of which it assumed it was the last. And in this realization, the Collector-Thing made the equivalent of a sigh of relief, content that this entity would achieve salvation by way of legacy. The Collector's heritage would continue, albeit in a form different than it had intended.

A new memory flooded the mind of the Collector-Thing. Something urgent. Something needing to be avoided but impossible to dodge. The Collector-Thing concentrated and drew the memory into mental view with further detail. In its clarity, there was shock. The Collector had wanted to chance being preserved, even during its hopeless attempt to wrestle free from the Insect-Things. It had hoped to crash in tolerable ice on a nearby planet before being fully consumed by the Thing, which, it had believed—or strongly hoped—would die from the impact.

The Collector-Thing decided to not attempt to change the ship's route. Being a perfect duplicate, it carried all the necessary vertebrae outlets for steering the vessel, yet it also recalled—while simultaneously realizing—that the loud screech bellowed by the Collector had not only been a cry out of desperation as the Thing had thought during consumption but also a strategic move for survival; a vocal override of the navigation system for a preplanned route as a contingency for such a situation.

It wasn't a matter of needing to make a practical attempt to redirect the ship's collision course at this point. There was no chance at backing out of the inevitable collision course. And the Collector-Thing screeched out of neither hopelessness or practicality but fear that had turned into anger and consequent rage. Instantly, memory paired with sudden understanding felt like self-immolation, a concept foreign to even something as alien as the Thing. In what was once a threat and possible enemy, the Collector had _indeed_ survived even after death, its goal of survival ironically imparted onto the Thing. Ironic resurrection, of sorts, the Collector-Thing considered.

The Collector-Thing tactfully opened the cells of the hundred lifeforms one-by-one, ravenously consuming them in totality. Some were already dead; but most were still alive, scurrying to escape their cages and making concerted efforts to avoid being eaten. Duplication, division and metamorphosis pervaded the Thing in exponential incarnations, and they eventually combined back into one, massive exoskeletal colossus in preparation of impact and sustenance.

Most of the lifeforms were too basic to provide ample genetic history that would aid the Thing in its unavoidable collision with the ice. One lifeform was particularly difficult to consume due to an acidic compound in its circulatory system, and its chemical composition prevented thorough assimilation of its genetic code. But it died along with all the others. In its layered feelings of dread and hunger, the Thing dwelled on the looming impact. The room of lifeforms from distant regions of the galaxy would normally be considered a treasure trove to the Thing, though under the weight of the ominous doom that awaited the ship, what would normally be the pleasurable partaking of lifeforms for possession and legacy transitioned into stockpiling proteins and reinforcing ancient mutations to survive the foreboding crash and unavoidable ice coffin.

The Thing looked at the view screen in ironic astonishment. The oncoming planet was a beautiful hue of blue. It was the prettiest planet in its system, according to the mental charts of the Collector being accessed by memory-knowledge, yet the icy platform on its southernmost pole, the prescribed path that had been dialed in by the Collector for collision, pierced any comforting expectations. Estranged from life, the Thing would need to use the reinforced exoskeleton of the Collector-Arthropod hybrid it had now shifted into. Survival _was_ fulfillment in this situation, the Thing concluded. A depth of fear it had never experienced ravaged its mind, drawing on the archaic memories of those lifeforms recently ingested, almost tauntingly. How long would it take to be found? Would it be found? How many ice ages would it need to endure before once again feeding and propagating? Would it even survive the oncoming impact? Would it be able to hide under a rock if it even survived?

The ship wobbled and descended above a stark, blue ocean. Contact with the atmosphere made the interior of the ship vibrate wildly. Pulsating lights rhythmically matched the quivering console that acted as a chaperon to potential death. Dread turned into rage, and a frantic effort to deviate the ship's course permeated the will of the Thing more than anything ever had in its experience. It slammed a massive pincer into the main engine, but the course held direct. Another slam. Fury from thousands of primeval impulses buried in millions of genetic memories possessed by the Thing resulted in a series of cathartic strikes to the ship's energy core. Cords went haywire, steam rose from all crevices of the room and the ship bobbed irreconcilably.

Fibrous tentacles with hardened shells exploded from the chest cavity of the Thing, gripping onto any leverage points it could find in the ship's interior. It was a mutation of all the strongest lifeforms it had ever integrated yet looked like none of them distinctly. Abomination incarnate, the strength of the Thing waned as the ship impacted the ice. A lucky skim in the form of an upending wobble allowed the ship to skip a mile across the frozen continent before being submerged in cold, icy water atop a massive ice structure. The Thing was smashed at three different points in the ship. Instinct allowed itself to regroup, broken parts creeping their way towards the smashed, impaled carcass. Dissociated from awareness, the need for survival overpowered all functions in the Thing, and after some time, it had regrouped itself into the original Arthropod-Thing that it had long taken form of just before being collected on that lonely planet. Nothing was recalled now except autonomic instincts borrowed from a plethora of once-possessed genomic forms, and then the cold set in.

At the site of the crash, the Collector-Thing accessed an ancient memory. Not a memory from its own experience, but one borrowed from a single, massive mammalian species on a planet that once shimmered near the outskirts of this galaxy's opposite end. It recalled famine. It was time to hibernate. Depth of thought crept back into its being, and the Thing took refuge in knowing that if no life naturally developed on this luscious planet with its own species, a jewel this fantastic in the middle of such darkness would lure something tasty, and that is how it would escape. Survival had been realized. The Thing knew it had to rest, and utilizing the nutrition from its recent meal, it hypnotized itself to sleep inside what it knew could be an icy grave despite all hope.


End file.
